Word: albions
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bond I swear-Stalin: O, swear not by perfidious Albion...
...died only last year, young and far from home, carried off by the yellow fever in French Haiti. Lydia Bailey, late of Philadelphia, looked as pure and demure in her portrait (by Gilbert Stuart, of course) as only a heroine in a historical novel can look. Handsome young Albion Hamlin stared at the portrait, shivered, felt "something intimate and personal" catch at his throat. The time: 1800-05. The range: post-Revolutionary U.S., the troubled Haiti of Toussaint L'Ouverture, North Africa at the time of the Barbary Wars...
Author Roberts finally pins Lear to the mat as one of the culprits in our "disgraceful as well as heroic" Tripolitan War. To do so he follows Lear from Haiti to the Mediterranean, dragging Albion and Lydia along to make love on the way. Albion reaches Haiti, finds Lydia not dead from yellow fever at all, and as pretty as her picture. He also finds Napoleon's troops trying to put down Toussaint's revolution, and willy-nilly mixes in on Toussaint's side. By page 300 Haiti is left far behind; Albion and Lydia languish...
...Albion's maiden envoy will embrace...
...still Stalin and Molotov his prophet. Its faith unshaken, but its vital gift for rationalization badly disrupted, Communist Humanite babbled: ". . . no insoluble divergence. Subsequent discussions will explain these questions more clearly." An emergency Communist line was appearing, to the effect that Russia was merely trying to keep perfidious Albion's claws off the Ruhr. French Communists would have to take comfort from the thought that their present distress was only a tactical interlude in Communism's grand strategy, and that whatsoever benefited Mother Russia would benefit all her Communist children...